The findings come as CNBC reveals ambitious plans to become the market leader in innovative and engaging digital content

The annual IPSOS Affluent study today confirmed CNBC International’s status as the number one business and financial news network in Europe.

The annual survey – which measures media consumption of the top 13% of Europe’s earners across 21 countries – finds 8.3 million affluent adults consume CNBC across all platforms, each month. That’s more than the Bloomberg (6.9); International New York Times (6.5); Financial Times (6) and The Economist (5.4).

IPSOS also finds that CNBC continues to be the destination for Europe’s influential C-suite with the network attracting almost 200,000* more senior executives per month than any other business media.

In addition to its dominance in TV, CNBC continues to grow its digital foot print. Omniture data finds the network reaches a global audience of almost 60 million unique users every month on CNBC.com. Today’s IPSOS data also finds that once users are at CNBC.com, they spend more time on the site than any of the networks core competitors.

John Casey, SVP of News and Programming at CNBC International said:

“The last 12 months have been a transformational for CNBC International. Not only have we increased our TV reach, we’ve also made concerted efforts to grow our influential and aspirational audience in the digital sphere. Digital traffic was up 12 per cent year-on-year in 2016 with even faster growth seen so far this year; our strategy now is to become the number one digital business news provider on the planet.”

In addition to substantial online traffic increases, CNBC International has also reported substantial growth to its social audience. In 2016, CNBC International’s social audience grew 302% in and engagement was up by 1,059%.